Senate GOP seeks Bergdahl hearing

Republicans are demanding an open hearing on the negotiated release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in return for five Taliban prisoners, arguing the classified hearing set for next week doesn’t go far enough.

Senate Republicans are pushing their Democratic colleagues and the White House to agree to an open discussion of the sensitive and potentially classified information. They say that the current level of disclosure on Bergdahl has sewn further discord between Capitol Hill Republicans and the White House — a relationship that’s been rocky for quite sometime.

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The GOP has questions about Bergdahl’s service, what Obama’s motivations were in making the deal to release Bergdahl and perhaps most notably, why senior congressional leaders were not given advance notice about the swap that led to the release of five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.

Due to their position in the Senate minority, the Senate GOP lacks the ability to set the chamber’s committee schedule. But Republicans were clearly perturbed that they were left out of the process and it didn’t take much on Monday to elicit fiery responses from GOP lawmakers.

“The law says they ought to give us 30 days’ notice; if the president thought that was unconstitutional or an invalid law he shouldn’t have signed the bill. He knew very well he was required by law to give us 30 days notice and he didn’t do it,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), the top Senate Republican on intelligence matters. “I don’t believe a thing this president says now.”

“The whole motive here is that the president wants to continue to try to shut [Guantanamo] down. He knows he doesn’t have the support of Congress and that’s part of the motivation,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It fits right in to what the president’s been trying to do with Gitmo since before he was president of the United States. And it’s kind of scary.”

Lawmakers received notice late Monday that on June 10, the Armed Services Committee will receive a classified briefing from the Defense Department’s lawyer and two other senior officials who work on defense policy in Afghanistan.

Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) did not totally dismiss having a public debate over Bergdahl, but said first his panel must hash out the sensitive debate in a secure room in the Capitol Visitor Center.

“We’ll make that decision after we get a classified hearing. But there’s a lot here that has to, I’m sure, remain very, very classified. And then we’ll decide after that whether we need another one,” Levin said.

Inhofe said he might abstain from the private briefing, citing frustrations with being unable to relay anything to the public afterward.

“I’m not even sure I want to go to a closed one. They tell you things that you can’t share. And if I can’t share it with the public, then I don’t want to know,” Inhofe said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who had sent Levin a request Monday to have such an open hearing, said a classified hearing was a good first step — even if it falls on the day of his Republican primary. But Graham argued that ultimately the discussion over Bergdahl must be a public one.

“We had open hearing when it came to problems at Gitmo and detainee abuse,” Graham said. “The public needs to be fully informed as much as possible about what this means to us.”

And with reports flying about Bergdahl’s service record and allegations that he’s a deserter, Graham said the Defense Department should be tasked with an independent investigation into Bergdahl to determine his record of service and fill in the biography of a man the U.S. worked so hard to release.

“The one thing I don’t want to do is judge this young man based on Internet rumors,” Graham said. “I want to find out why he left his post and the ramifications of leaving his post.”